ADAPTABILITY OF POLITICAL PARTIES TO THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS? SOME EVIDENCE FROM SLOVENIA AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC.

This article examines the adaptability of Slovenian and Czech political parties to the global economic and financial crisis that hit Europe in 2008. Following many political scientists, we expected parties to adapt to the public’s preferences and to address, directly or indirectly, the issue of the growing scope of precarious work in their election programmes. The analysis revealed that parties barely followed the public’s preferences, opting not to directly respond to the challenge. However, it is obvious that the parties made considerable adaptations in response to challenges from the international environment because virtually all of their election programmes mentioned the issue of the labour market’s flexibility. As expected, in this regard, it is possible to detect the importance of party ideology since liberal and conservative parties as a rule saw a bigger need to introduce flexibility to the labour market to a greater extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]